I Hate Special K

Yes, I hate the date-rape drug but I am actually talking about the cereal this time. How can a lowly box of spurious nutrition engender such hatred? Easy. This:
On a recent trip to New York, I awoke to a beautiful morning and this ad plastered about 200 feet high on the building across from my hotel. Suddenly I didn't feel like ordering breakfast any more.

Special K consistently has some of the worst marketing campaigns I've ever seen. Their marketing slogan might as well read, "We Hate Women's Bodies So You Will Too." It's even more ironic considering that their target market is women.

You Vs. The Bikini. Is there any better way to set up an adversarial relationship between a woman and her body than by reducing it to three wee pieces of fabric and a bow? It gets even better when you consider that the woman in question already has a bikini worthy body. So if she can't even wear a bikini with confidence then how can the rest of us even dream of attempting it?

Oh, but wait! They have an answer to that. Eat Special K! Specifically, replace two of your meals a day with a nutritionally void bowl of breakfast cereal. Of course you will lose weight (and your mind) this way - a bowl of Special K with the milk is a mere 160 calories. That's adds up to almost a 1000-calorie deficit for a woman used to eating a moderate 1800 calories per day.

You Vs. Your Blood Sugar. The third ingredient in Special K is sugar. The fourth is high fructose corn syrup. And that's just for the relatively tame "original" flavor. (Can you really call it a flavor if it tastes just like the box it came in?) The decadent sounding "chocolatey delight" flavor, not only has the same amount of sugar and high fructose corn syrup as Lucky Charms but also includes "chocolatey" bits - so called because there is no actual anti-oxidant bearing chocolate in them. These chocolatey bits have even more sugar and... the Great Evil of 2006: trans fats.

In a country where type II diabetes is rampant and obesity is increasing at such a rate that it has become a tenet of every presidential candidate's platform, is it really responsible to promote this as good health?

Oops, my bad. They never said it would make you healthy. They only said it will make you thin.